I was hoping to ignore this conversation, oh well.
I question the assertion that there has been "trouble" with the STC specification - just the normal back and forth with any standard format or interface as it faces different stakeholders. Arnold was responsive to our needs (basically for general targeting coordinates, not just RA and Dec) by producing the STCLite schema. I gather you guys vetoed STCLite. Really don't want to have the discussion to figure out if that is your mandate. In any event, we (the VOEvent WG) have revisited the issue and have made one little suggestion - a suggestion that it appears other folks have previously made. Would expect the discussion to continue until a consensus is formed.
It is a VO-wide issue, not specific to VOEvent, to assert a preference for schemata that are widely supported by parsers in the field.
Question whether "archival ingest, registry, retrieval, and query" cover all the bases of the VO. Strongly agree with Alasdair that VOEvent will be an important facility of the VO as well as of the broader astronomical community - it's more than just "having Institution A alert Institution B that it saw something". Question the wisdom of freezing the scope of the VO before the VO acquires a user base. Didn't think "virtual" was intended to apply to its user community.
> The VO should provide a fairly exacting set of scientific
> standards. Projects are free to create copies of the schema
> and knock out parts and change required elements to optional
> ones.
Suspect I'm not the only one to question the wisdom of this point of view. Is this free-for-all really preferable to having just two standard choices of STC and a simplified STCLite? For an important facility such as STC, it is quite reasonable to expect multiple stakeholders such as VOEvent to influence the development of a common standard. Suggest this would be simplified in the future were a User's Guide to STC available.
Rob
seaman-at-noao.edu
Received on 2005-12-15Z18:51:17